Beautiful plaques are key to West Cork’s bird life

ON THESE bright winter mornings, when the tide is out, the sand of Courtmacsherry Bay is carved by cobalt rivers, flowing toward the surf line in the distance. 

The bay seems bigger then than when it’s full of sea, broken and brimming in bad weather, or when it’s calm as a mirror, the coloured boats set as if in silver. Everything glitters, everything gleams.

The shining rivers curve across the broad plain, cut deeply into it and make islands. Usually, one is the “mother river”, the channel, wider than the rest, and shallow. It gathers the streams and takes them to the sea. In its widest meanders, birds, by the hundreds, gather, roosting on the sand banks, padding in the slower, deeper water.